Introduction: Fellow Travelers — or — The Artist’s Artists
This essay is part of a larger constellation of works. Read the rest here.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and André Breton, 1938.
An author who teaches a writer nothing, teaches nobody anything.'
— Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”
The critical relationship of aestheticizing politics / politicizing aesthetics is addressed most acutely in Walter Benjamin’s writings, notably The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and The Author as Producer. The Work of Art essay is canonical in art schools, and its foundation — that art in an industrial age takes on new meanings — should be well understood in the abstract as well as in our everyday lives. And yet! Industrialization eclipsed everything previously associated with art — ritual, art as religion, genius, and so forth — for the sake of democratizing art, akin to the way the printing press democratized literacy. Most of the confusions about art and society today are due to the new democratization of art, an indeterminate social experiment that’s led to every manifestation imaginable, a “vulgar cauldron” of culture, to borrow a phrase from Melville. Even prior to Benjamin, Nietzsche noticed that aesthetic experience is nearly synonymous with life in modern society — just about everything, including those things which were not inherently aesthetic, are now bound up in artifice, lie, art. Benjamin, writing amidst the advent and then failure of mass Socialist politics, perceived this democratizing process as taking two polarizing forms — the aestheticization of politics, and the politicization of aesthetics. Fascism aestheticizes politics, whereas radical politics would politicize aesthetics. Any radical orientation to art should pursue the latter. But what does this actually mean?
In Benjamin’s moment, there was a lot of theorizing and social organization around the art question. Now that art was bound up in politics, it was but a short step to presume that art should serve the party. In the Soviet Union, there were explicit attempts to make ‘proletarian art’ — the Proletkult, or “art with a tendency” as it was then called — that would supposedly be inherently radical — good, morally useful art — by simply identifying with the right cause. And yet, Leon Trotsky, a political leader who actually led a (near) revolution, wrote a lengthy book titled Literature and Revolution which argues against this direct subordination of art to political ideology. In Trotsky’s view, this subordination was backwards, any proletarian art would end up liquidating the historically important value of art into a politics that should be autonomous, and that moreover had also become counter-revolutionary. For Trotsky, there was no such thing as a ‘proletarian art’, in part because such an identification showed the poverty of the artists’ understanding of revolutionary theory, as well as the true significance of art history. The merging of the two was a symptom of regression. Art was invaluable for representing the new, complicated emotions of modern life, and the meaning of industrialization was not that art’s scope should narrow to identify with political ideology, but rather expand, “ploughing the field in all directions". “Even lyrics of the smallest scope have a right to exist in the new society.” Socialism was not meant to constrict the artistic process, but rather to expand it, and so to expand our aesthetic experience, to “feel the world anew". It is the new aesthetic feelings of such “new humans” that should be politicized. This is the task of politics when it comes to art: to politicize aesthetics, to raise to an acute level the new feelings and thoughts which are often only subconsciously revealed in artworks, and to make social meaning of those new feelings.
Trotsky implemented the useful metaphor that art and politics are “fellow travelers". That is, they pursue the same goal of freedom, but by different means. This concept-image is enough to furnish anyone with an imagination and reason everything they need to think about the matter.
The metaphor evokes a number of questions: Where have these fellow travelers come from? Why must they travel together? Do they go anywhere specific? Have they always traveled together? Do they enjoy traveling together, or is it a forced companionship? Would they be better traveling separately? How are responsibilities delegated? What is the quality of the journey? Is it fun and/or arduous? Will they arrive at their destination? Is there a destination? Will they make it together? How far along on this journey are they, and how much farther will they have to go? What happens at the end of the journey? Etc!
The way I see it is that art and politics found themselves trailblazing an arduous path that they hope leads to freedom. The collective goal of freedom is a modern one, so they have only been traveling together for a short duration, at least explicitly. I think they are the only travelers — the status quo masses don’t move, or at least only follow — and have been forced to deal with each other, with all the interpersonal pathologies this develops over time. There is mutual respect and adventurous spirit in these relations, but there is also today an unhealthy co-dependency and projective identification. One tends to lean on the other, making both weak and impairing their progress. Today, after such fraught and difficult travels, and many failures, they need to rediscover their own individuality, divide and conquer a bit more, stop doing everything together, for the sake of the greater vision. It is probably the decay of the vision, the temporal distance from the original inspiring dream, that has distorted their relationship and made them lost. They have become addicted to one another’s company, myopically focused on each other instead of the end goal, which would unite them. The binding of one to the other actually represents failure, and not progress. In today’s psychological terms, we’d call such a relationship co-dependent — they are tied up together, but not for their mutual benefit. The one should allow the other to be their best, but today, we see each at their worst, and are led to question what is actually beneficial about this relationship at all. Ideally it can be salvaged, but it might also need a separation. Ultimately, the greatest determining factor will be a renewed excitement for the vision that will keep them moving along instead of paralyzed. And yet this requires imagination. Typically, imagination is the special domain of art, so politics cannot truly make any progress without art. But then, what if artists have a collective failure of imagination, or try to be politicians?
What Benjamin and Trotsky were pointing to was a new crossroads for art, and really for experience as we know it, the extent to which art is the primary means by which we mediate and clarify experience in our era. Benjamin perceived that the problem of art with a “tendency” — tendentious art — was that truthfully it is art that is true to its own form that represents any radical orientation. Now that art was finally free from servitude to religion, monarchy, and so forth, the radical implications were that artists could now freely explore anything — to crawl back into servitude to anything other than its own means of production and conditions of possibility would express an even greater unfreedom than when art served religion. The subordination of art to political ideology — the aestheticization of politics — propaganda in various forms, had seemingly gripped the masses with the rise of fascism, National Socialism, and the emergence of authoritarian, administered society more broadly. To paraphrase the Marxist psychologist Wilhelm Reich, people appeared to fear their new freedoms, rather than explore them. Artists have only been able to rise above this at the cost of their own relevance. At least directly.
The critic Clement Greenberg reframed the crossroads to be a matter of avant-garde or kitsch that would define life in our era. If experience was primarily expressed through art in our new mass culture, what kind would it be? If art is administered in civil society, how would it meaningfully be arranged? Kitsch would be any art that simply regurgitates political and aesthetic ideologies, pre-digested art that circumvents the critical thinking that avant-garde art sensitively cultivates. The avant-garde was that sensibility that possessed “a superior consciousness of [art] history.” This is essentially what Benjamin was arguing for in art being true to its own tendency, freely following its own conditions of possibility. Greenberg’s formulation is perhaps more overtly optimistic in another respect — that kitsch and avant-garde art are two sides of the same coin. In our era we will have both. We will have kitsch because any citizen is now free to make art, they don’t have to be a divine genius or whatever. Anyone can pick up a craft, make a movie, write a book, become a painter. But this, however, does not mean it will inherently be self-critical and follow its own tendencies. This is where the avant-garde comes in — with such aesthetic development in modern society, there will be those artists who develop or possess a deeper understanding of the meaning of art history; historical consciousness being a means of articulating the present. In basic terms, the avant-garde is there as an educational resource for artists who otherwise would be regurgitating ideology in their art, or simply just puttering around aimlessly. Benjamin had earlier stated in The Author as Producer that:
An author who teaches a writer nothing, teaches nobody anything.The determinant factor is the exemplary character of a production that enables it, first, to lead other producers to this production, and secondly to present them with an improved apparatus for their use. And this apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production, in short that it is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators.
Artists who don’t teach other artists are not important artists. Avant-garde artists are inherently educators — Artist’s Artists! They don’t make art for the fickle masses directly, but for other artists. The avant-garde operates almost like a resource for lesser artists who would aspire to more, and without whose aspirations the avant-garde is adrift. And so it serves such a purpose today — we writers look to canonical avant-garde texts for inspiration, reflection, and guidance. We 21st century composers look to exemplary music works to challenge, bolster, and develop our music, continuing and expanding an important tradition. The most important tradition — that of art, one of the only things humanity has going for it. To liquidate art into politics would be the profoundest failure of politics and art. It would mean suicide on the road to freedom.
Do we have an avant-garde sensibility today? Do we write music for other musicians, to teach them, and in teaching them to learn something about our own work in the process? Are we musician’s musicians? Do listeners learn how to listen more acutely, more sensitively through our music? Do we resolutely take up a leadership role or, impossible as that may be, accept with humility and gratitude that there are more refined artists from whom we can learn, by listening better to the incomplete projects of the dead? If, like the Left, the avant-garde is dead, can we at least be good enough students, can we be those exemplary kitsch artists who aspire to become more, who see new possibilities where others merely aim to serve what exists? Such a project of aesthetic self-education might be considered the politicization of aesthetics.
Or do we rather fear our aesthetic freedoms, aspiring to please the intellectual baseness and aesthetic falseness of a political current that has stagnated on the road to freedom, fed up with its fellow traveler’s silly games — a politics that is itself aesthetic, but of a kitsch kind, a kind that could actually learn something from a more refined artistic sensibility? In the baseness of our hearts and the weakness of our egos, do we beg to serve society in its status-quo form, to use art merely as a means of decorating the trash-heap we live in, reducing art to mere entertainment, despairing to receive petty awards for merely drawing windows on our prison walls?
Will artists in our century develop imaginations that can see beyond their fellow traveler, for the sake of saving their beloved fellow traveler? Who are our artist’s artists?
This essay is part of a larger constellation of works: Roasted Pigeons or Art Left Work
